The Roman force under Gellius caught up with Crixus, killing the leader along with many of his rebels. This did not work out well for the rebels.
Each man may have commanded 10,000 troops.īy the spring of 72 B.C., Spartacus may have had 40,000 troops, some of which stayed in south Italy with his co-leader Crixus while the remainder advanced towards the Alps under the command of Spartacus. Back in Rome, the senate grew impatient and sent a large army led by the consuls Lucius Gellius Publicola and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus. Spartacus continued to ambush and defeat Roman units while freeing slaves in the countryside and gathering supplies.
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“They were able to build such a formidable force in part because many freedmen and other free commoners joined their ranks along with thousands of fugitive slaves,” writes historian Michael Parenti in an essay published in the book "Spartacus: Film and History" (Blackwell, 2006). In time, he even succeeded in getting non-slaves to join his rebellion. Additionally, according to ancient sources, Spartacus insisted on equally dividing the spoils, something that made recruitment all the more easier. Throughout his rebellion, his army spent much of its time in rural areas and small towns, places that were poorly defended but had an abundance of slaves.
The growth of Spartacus’s force was aided by other factors. “At this point, many of the herdsmen and shepherds from the surrounding regions - hard-bodied and swift-footed men - came to join the slaves.” This success resulted in new recruits flocking to the force of Spartacus. When the Romans fled, the slaves seized their camp,” Plutarch wrote. The “slaves were able to surround them and to shock the Romans with a surprise attack. The Romans, still in camp, never saw them coming. Spartacus took the initiative, having his newly liberated slaves build rope out of wild vines so they could move down the mountainside to a spot the Roman had neglected to defend. Instead, they blocked off the main route up Vesuvius, pitched camp and tried to starve him out. Glaber’s ad-hoc army didn’t even try to attack Spartacus. This man, and another person named Publius Valerius, whom they despatched later, “did not command the regular citizen army of legions, but rather whatever forces they could hastily conscript on the spot,” wrote Appian, a writer who also lived in the second century A.D. The Romans despatched a praetor named Gaius Claudius Glaber to form an army to crush the slaves.
Furthermore, a group of escaped slaves were not seen as posing a serious challenge to Roman soldiers. At the time of his breakout, the Republic’s military was fighting in Spain, southeast Europe and Crete. Rome did not respond to Spartacus’ growing force seriously. On their way, Spartacus and his co-leaders, Crixus and Oenomaus, raided for supplies and recruited slaves in the countryside. While at the school, Spartacus helped organize a breakout that led to more than 70 gladiators escaping armed with knives, cleavers and other makeshift weapons they got from the kitchen. At some point he was captured, brought to Rome and sold as a slave to a man referred to at times as “Vatia.” This man owned a gladiator school in Capua, about 120 miles (193 kilometers) southeast of Rome. He appears to have served in a Roman auxiliary unit for a time, deserted and became either a bandit or insurgent against the Romans. This is SpartacusĪccording to the surviving sources, Spartacus was from Thrace, an area in southeast Europe that the Romans were often trying to subjugate during the first century B.C. Accounts from only about a dozen ancient writers survive to this day, and none of the surviving reports was written by Spartacus or one of his supporters. Also, while Spartacus was a real person who has inspired revolutionaries and filmmakers, scholars do not have an abundant amount of information about him. A favorite character in popular fiction, he was not crucified, and there was no “I’m Spartacus!” moment as seen in the famous 1960 Stanley Kubrick film.